Michael Tiemann's blog

In July I was honored to be appointed Visiting Scholar at SILS, the School of Information and Library Science and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. The Information and Library Science community and the Open Source community share many common passions, especially the belief that sharing knowledge is important and good work. And increasingly I see a shared fate for both communities...

In a followup to a previous blog posting, I read in today's headlines that NASA has corrected their position and decided to disclose research that they had planned to destroy—a victory for transparency and for public safety.

The news report I read was from CNN.

Last month I visited Beijing and Hong Kong on a trip through Asia. It seems that everybody visiting China—Beijing in particular—comes back saying "you just cannot imagine...". I stayed at the Kerry Centre Hotel near the Red Hat Beijing office, and as I walked across the street for my morning cup of coffee, I saw the CCTV building. I was litterally dumbfounded. I got my coffee, walked back to my room in disbelief, called my wife, Amy, 12 timezones away and said "you just cannot imagine..."

I am a proud user of Blender, the free open source 3d content creation suite, but not yet a proud artist. That will take time, practice, and a lot more digital paint on my brushes before all is said and done. Nevertheless, I am on my way.

CNN just reported that NASA is refusing to disclose air safety data. The topic paragraph summarizes the facts of the report:

Anxious to avoid upsetting air travelers, NASA is withholding results from an unprecedented national survey of pilots that found safety problems like near collisions and runway interference occur far more frequently than the government previously recognized.

What does this have to do with Open Source software?

If Al Gore can win the Nobel Peace Prize for bringing the findings of the scientific community to the political forefront, perhaps Richard Stallman should be next in line for his early and tireless advocacy against Software Patents. And the sooner, the better.

I am the son of an anchorman. I am a First Amendment guy. In a statement after Diana's death, I said the only thing worse than out-of-control photographers with no sense of conscience would be trying to restrict them. You can't restrict freedom of speech or the press, even if it is miserable.
— George Clooney quoted in TIME

Copied from osi@opensource.org (the inbound channel to the OSI board):

On 9/28/07, Luis Ibanez wrote:

OSI Board:

As developers of Open Source software, at Kitware we are very excited to see that is more and more common for federal funding agencies to require or encourage the creation and use of open source software when they announce funding programs.

We see with concern however that funding agencies don't seem to have a defined standard on what "Open Source" means, and as a consequence they and the public not always receive what they are expecting in return for the investment of public funds.

According to an article published in Enterprise Open Source Magazine, CIOs interviewed by Forrester Research rank freedom more important than price or cost when considering open source software.

"The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." -- Albert Einstein

Last week I flew to Las Vegas to talk on stage with The Gartner Group's lead open source analyst Mark Driver at their 2007 Open Source Summit. The subject of the discussion was a paper I presented last year in Kyoto at the STS Forum entitled Software Industry vs. Software Society: Who Wins in 2020?". In that paper I cited a reference that the global IT spend is USD $1T (one trillion dollars!), and of that $1T, $180B is pure write-off of failed applications, and that another $206B (my estimate) is also lost due to late, broken, or late-and-broken applications. Such a dismal result has not only plunged the software industry into crisis, but has put industries using IT at risk.